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Friday, January 20, 2012

Friday Fiction is your opportunity to write a short (short, short, short) story. Many participants use more than one minute for Friday Fiction prompts, and I don't generally take the length of the post into account when I name a Friday winner.

Click on the "Friday Fiction" tag beneath the post to see more examples of Friday Fiction writings.

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4 comments:

Michael V
said...

David sat on an old wooden park bench that had been there since when the park was first built; the white paint faded and peeling like sardonic dandruff.

The bench had never been taken away, however; it was too much of a legend among the park-goers. It was still very sturdy. As David sat on the knotted, time-worn oak, he thought about his life in general.

Before long, he noticed the dark gray clouds that were looming over him like circling buzzards, and he reluctantly stood up and picked up his folded red umbrella from the grass where it sat and started walking down the sidewalk, into the rain...

* * *

That same knotted oak park bench still sits in that very park, ten years later, and everything is still very much the same...

He liked to call them knots. He had made up that name himself. Of course he did, there was nobody else around to make it up. “Knots” of the walking dead. He noticed right away that they seemed to shuffle around in groups. He had thought that they were most dangerous in knots. Too many for one man to handle alone. That’s when they’d get you. But they are easier to see in knots and that means easier to avoid all together. That one you don’t see until it’s too late. The one that’s trapped in the overturned car you are standing next to. Those are the ones you have to worry about. He figured that out himself, too. The hard way.

At last he asked, "Will you marry me, Darling?""Oh, my Dear, I thought you'd never ask," she sighed."Wonderful. We'll set a date to tie the knot."Her face changed completely. "No, no knot tying.""Sweetie, it's only a metaphor.""Metaphors matter. A lot. To me.""I didn't mean --""Yes, you did. You're like everyone else, wanting to tie me up, make me you possession. Well, there'll be no knots. I wanted to marry you, but now I don't. I will not be tied in a knot."

Gradually the soft bustling of visitors behind and around her faded. So did the clinking of glasses and forks and spoons on plates. All she could see was the many camel brown threads braided together into a rope. All she could see was the fat knot made with the rope. The leftover rope may have been free and the knot may have looked sophisticated in that framed photograph at the gallery but she saw the ugliness within. It was a fine Saturday night of teenage, of a long time ago it seemed, that it happened and kept happening every night since then. It was an action of someone else's greed feeding on her innocence, night after night. Each night she slept with her eyes open. Each morning she woke knowing where the day would head. Each evening she lay, guilty and confused, as the many fine threads of her nascent womanhood fastened itself into the thick, fat, sophisticated but filthy knot of hatred for the bed and its relevance to the relationship between a man and a woman.